Epistemic status: In the back of my head I think I may see
things differently somewhat as I work on my Bible commentary. But
I think this is my default perspective from natural theology.
Is God lonely, or is he socially fulfilled? MSL
(as I currently understand it) requires that there be at least two
persons who make up Legitimacy, and the Bible (in the orthodox view)
says that God consists of three persons.
Someone I knew made a claim somewhat like this: God the Father enjoys
community with the other two members of the Trinity.
I am not sure that person even believed in the Trinity and if not
perhaps was trying to make me think of God in such a way that I would
live a more conventionally healthy life. It's interesting that our
concepts of God affect our concepts of what kinds of life are acceptable
and vice versa. Maybe the person I knew believed that there's nothing
to really know about God, so we should pragmatically shape our concept
of him to serve our purposes, to deal with the obvious and undeniable
problems caused by pain.
But if there's a fact of the matter about God, what is it?
It makes sense that the Father, Son, and Spirit enjoy a
strong bond with each other, and other than times like Gethsemane,
which I would assume are rare, we don't see any temptation to
discord between them. They have a complete kinship (on the level
of who they are) by their faithfulness to being Legitimacy, and
other than during Jesus' life on earth, they may have had no
experience of parting or lack of communication.
But they are probably not emotionally satisfied on a social
level, because of the billions of people who misunderstand them
or even reject them. If you think of God as power, wisdom, and
permanence, then God is plenitude. But God's power is thwarted by
a single feeble human who chooses not to trust him. If you think
of God as love, he is poor, because love impoverishes itself.
God is disestablished
by us and will only be established (really himself) when the
beings who exist are fully in tune with him. By being our father
(and not some professional deity) while we are strangers to him,
he values us personally in a way that we do not reciprocate. And
to love someone who does not love you in kind is a lonely thing to
do.
One way to think of God is that he (or they) are vast, greater
than all the stars we think are in the universe. But another
way is to think that God is miniscule, only three beings
in a vast sea of living people (and other spirits), and who knows
how many dead people waiting to be resurrected.
--
Does this mean that God suffers from poor mental health, in some
sense? It sounds like it. But maybe that is what is required of
love.
God has to manage to do his work anyway. We tend to think
that we have to shut off our emotional understanding of reality
so that we can get the work done that will make things better.
This grown-up way of doing things makes it so that we no longer
see the world as vividly, neither the rightness nor the wrongness of
it.
If we take this to its logical conclusion, nothing matters, and
then getting work done (the thing that was our reason for shutting
off emotions) is pointless. We might think that God is a
professional and sets his feelings aside to get the job done
of serving us. But if he is too professional, maybe he will feel
like there is no point to anything and blink us out of existence.
We might not mind that, if we too have shut off our emotions to the
point that we feel like our own existence doesn't matter. But we
might not like it if he gradually lost a sense of meaning, and
withdrew from the world on the personal level long before he
stopped making the psychological and physical underpinnings of it
work. A world that gradually gets more and more neglected by God
is one that will get more and more messed up, more and more a hell.
So we would want it to be the case that God is bound to an emotional
truth, some set of emotional responses following from the meaning of
things. God's feelings would enable him to keep us out of hell.
This truth, or these truths, may be inconvenient. They are part
of Legitimacy, which is God and who he
is. Legitimacy, that things should be and the way that they
should be, determines how a person should respond to whatever
the state of reality is. God has to respond to the truth even
if it's not pragmatic. Instead, he has to feel the feelings
that are true and still function. God's job is a hard job,
harder than yours or mine.
(Also as a consequence of everything
being experience and thus all metaphysical contact being that
of consciousness experiencing another consciousness, God feels our
pain exactly as we do and thus can't rest if we can't rest.)
--
Is loneliness really mental illness? Even intense loneliness?
What exactly is "mental illness"? Thinking it over a bit, I wasn't
sure I could easily draw the line between mental illness and what is
not mental illness. But I thought "Why do we care about mental illness?"
Generally we care about mental illness if it's something that makes
it so that we are not in touch with reality, or so that we harm ourselves
or others. Is loneliness self-harm? There is harm in negative feelings
(subjective). Sometimes, but not necessarily to the point that we die,
harm others, or fail to perform whatever good that we ought to for them
(more objective). (The difference
between subjective and objective harm.)
Being lonely might make us more in touch with reality. Both
in the sense that when we are alone, we realize that we are alone most
truly by being lonely, and because when we seek to be really in touch
with reality, it might make us be alone. As a consequence of really
being excellent at minimizing harm in the world overall, it may make
you different from most other personal beings and thus alone on that
level. So if we are trying to minimize
"harm-and-being-out-of-touch-with-reality" (H + !R), we might need to
sometimes become more lonely. Minimizing mental illness in a conventional
sense might cause us to have more (H + !R), because "mental illness" as
culturally defined may not consider the bigger picture of what reality
could be. (Sometimes, of course, reducing (as opposed to minimizing)
mental illness in a conventional sense reduces (H + !R).)
--
We want it to be the case that God's (H + !R) does not get so high
that he is untrustworthy, unable to fulfill the role of "good God" for
all of us. Clearly, God is untrustworthy at least
locally by allowing evil to happen (hence the problem of evil).
However, this is bearable if we believe that there was a time before
evil and a time after it is gone forever. We would like it to be the
case that God is unshakeably good-willed and ultimately competent.
In the MSLN theodicy,
it is assumed that God permits evil as a consequence of his holiness.
It is because he is unable to will evil that he needs evil beings to
will it for him in order for us to be tempted (a necessary part of
us having a choice whether to love him or not), and then those evil
beings have leverage to make the world worse than it needs to be. God
is powerful enough to end any reality (any evil), but it turns out that
for the best good outcome to happen (for us to really love him), he must
permit the world to have evil in it (to end evil would mean he would have
to end us). From that angle, God is behaving in a maximally trustworthy
manner, because he is doing the best that can be done for our spiritual
well-being. (But it is understandable if not all people can see that all
the time, given what happens to them.) Still, what is most trustworthy
is some day when evil is gone. God is not on the side of evil and can't
stand it forever, so it will be gone, and hopefully each reader of this
post will be on God's side when that day comes, rather than identifying
with evil in any way.
MSLN theodicy (if it's true) gives us a reason to be certain that
God's character is completely trustworthy and that evil exists for
an ultimately good reason, and that in terms of "raw power" (what
omnipotence may be talking about, I think) God is powerful enough to
get his will done, and thus that untrustworthiness is only temporary.
But another solution to the problem of evil could conceivably be that
God is mentally ill, and inconsistently opposes and supports evil,
for reasons that may always be inscrutable to us.
So now I would want to rule out the possibility that God could
be mentally ill in a way that threatens his ultimate trustworthiness.
I will attempt to do so using (H + !R) as a measure of trustworthiness.
(H + !R) = "harms self or others, is not in touch with reality".
If God wills harm for others, it might be because it's the least
harmful thing to do in the end ("teaching a lesson"), but if he's
not into harm-minimization, he's not legitimate and not God. There
are two ways to show this, the "abstract" way, and the "personal"
way. The "abstract" way is that harm is a class of damaging something
(by definition) which is a diminution of that thing's value on some
level -- something which keeps it from its most-valuable state.
Legitimacy (value itself) would have to be in favor of whatever
was valuable, and thus for each thing to be its most valuable (and thus
least-harmed), whenever possible.
The "personal" way is to look at
"axizeiology" and consider how we as personal
beings think of legitimacy, and especially maximal legitimacy (that which
can't be argued against). It is as though we have instilled in us an
instinct for recognizing legitimacy, which is helpful in identifying
what legitimacy ought to be. We know in this personal way that beings
that are maximally legitimate love,
and choose the maximally competent course of action. To whatever
extent that legitimacy is mentally ill, it still chooses maximally
competent courses of action.
What looks like mental illness can be to
be two or more wills in one body (or for a body to be possessed by a
bad will), or to have a bad will which sometimes masquerades as a good
will. In order for legitimacy to love, all of its wills must love
(legitimacy can comprise multiple persons). There is a harmony in
legitimacy. So what ought to be legitimate is a person (or a set of
persons) who are not inclined to harm, and who choose the maximally
competent path to avoid harm. Whatever could be called mentally ill
in them must be something that doesn't impinge on that. Loneliness
or other pains may be psychologically costly (subjectively harm), but
they do not prevent God from choosing the maximally competent course
of action. He (they, given that God is both a community and its chief
member) always does the right thing given the constraints he works
with. And to really love sometimes requires suffering, even intense
suffering.
Is God in touch with reality? Legitimacy must metaphysically connect
with all things it legitimates and thus has all data that exists at
its disposal (it is conscious of what it connects to). Legitimacy connects
to everything that exists. Does it sufficiently generate enough thoughts
to understand reality in depth? (Like generating enough theories to
understand given data.) In order to validate something, you have to know
how it relates to everything else. Axizeiologically, Legitimacy must
understand how everything relates
to everything else as part of being competent. So God, as Legitimacy,
must be completely in touch with reality, both by possessing knowledge
of all that is and by coming to as deep an understanding of it as
possible.
In that case, we have reason to think that God passes the (H + !R)
test for trustworthiness, and so to whatever extent God is mentally ill,
it does not render him untrustworthy. His mental illness is not a form
which renders him incoherent internally, so he is of one unified will
which loves.
